Social Variation in the History of English - Einzelansicht

While social class has long been identified as a key extralinguistic variable in modern sociolinguistics, it is only in the last two decades that this variable has gained more attention in historical linguistics. As modern concepts based on social class are not applicable to earlier periods of English, alternative approaches to social stratification have been introduced. In this seminar, we will examine how concepts such as social networks and communities of practice are applied in historical linguistics to gain further insights into the processes of language change in the history of English.